Copyright Settlement Counsel

Settle your case anonymously, for less.

Did you see Dallas Buyers Club? I haven’t. I want to, I just haven’t gotten around to it. I’m sure I’ll eventually DVR it from HBO and then watch it over the course of a week, since that’s what you do when you have kids.

Anyway, it seems that some people aren’t content to wait until it shows up at their local Redbox and have been trading it over BitTorrent.

I understand. BitTorrent is free and easy, it’s very tempting. Unfortunately, sometimes saving the $5.99 it would cost to rent a movie from iTunes isn’t the best decision.

It’s not common for a non-pornographic movie to be the subject of a copyright infringement action, but it happens. The Hurt Locker was one of the first movies to get involved in BitTorrent litigation. There were a few others I can recall off-hand: Far Cry (yeah, someone made a movie based on the video game), Donkeyball (I really didn’t want to look up that one), Fast Track: No Limits, Familiar Strangers, and Cornered! (a low budge slasher starring Steve Guttenberg). There’s another current case for the movie Elf-Man, which is a Jason Acuna (Wee Man from Jackass) vehicle.

Pornographic movies tend to dominate this sphere for a couple reasons. Partially because they’re commonly traded online, partially because many of the defendants want to quietly settle so their particular fetish doesn’t show up in an pre-employment screening. Also, it’s doubtful there is much a porn studio could do to diminish the demand for it’s products.

The others (I don’t think I can really call them “mainstream”) have a slightly different dynamic, although I wouldn’t necessarily want to explain to a potential employer why I wanted to watch Elf-Man so bad.